


Like Opposite Faces of a Blade

by MapleMooseMuffin



Series: Sheith Month 2017 [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, Day 2: Hades, I haven't written anything this weird in ages, I mean it's not weird it's just really poetic, In which I kind of butcher mythology, Keith is kind of Persephone I guess, M/M, Mild Angst, Sheith Month, SheithMonth2k17, Shiro is the god of death, There is a LOT of metaphore in this one, Zarkon is Zeus, aka Hades/Pluto, it's kind of self-endulgent, just cuz really, the galra are gods and so are Keith and Shiro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 16:59:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11810304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MapleMooseMuffin/pseuds/MapleMooseMuffin
Summary: When the God of Wheat was born, the rest agreed there had never been so bright and golden a deity since the Sun God himself. He was human in texture, with peachy skin and eyes the color of summer thunderstorms, but no God could say he was not beautiful.Not even the God of Death.--In which Keith is a god who makes everything grow and Shiro is a god who takes away all life. Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back. Or in this case, heartache.





	Like Opposite Faces of a Blade

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, so this consumed my thoughts for the better half of the last three weeks.  
> Okay technically this prompt was Hades, but Hades was also called Pluto, and according to some googling I did, while Hades was considered a violent kidnapper when it came to Persephone, Pluto is considered her loving husband. And well, considering Kerberos is Pluto's moon, and Kerberos is the alternate name for Cerberus, the three headed dog in the Underworld, I thought it was more fitting to go with that. Not that you can actually tell, but like... he's Pluto in my mind, okay?  
> There's a lot of imagery and metaphor in this? Like, I kind of went to town. I also deviated a lot from mythology so if you're a big greek/roman mythology buff please forgive me, but creative license has to count for something.  
>   
> Beta'd by the lovely [nonamemanga](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonamemanga), who has been kind enough to put up with my various style changes, random whims, and inability to properly express myself. Thanks for all your help, friend!  
> Please enjoy~

            The world is damp, dark, and cold when Keith awakes. He has never seen a place so absent of color, of life, and even the ground beneath him refuses to bloom in his wake, as it has done for the whole of his time among humankind.

            Some lurking part of him feels he ought to be afraid. He doesn’t know where he is, nor how he wound up here, remembers only a storm filled to the brim with Zarkon’s thunderous rage. It wasn’t the first since he joined the humans down below, hidden from the Gods who were so incapable of anything but harassment, but never before had that wrath of the King of the Gods been so great, nor so fierce. Keith would bet that more than one man lost his life to the tempest.

            Perhaps he is dead.

            Keith had never heard of death before joining the men below, had never seen the pallor of a corpse or the stiffness of a body no longer animated. This was knowledge that came with his descent, a new understanding of the world that the Gods could not provide him in his youth. The men told Keith of the one no one above spoke of, the God of the Underworld, banished there to protect the world from his influence. He lurked, they warned, always waiting to snatch up the elderly, the children, the fools. A thief of life, the God of Death.

            If he is dead, snatched up by this mysterious God, supposedly pale as bone, with eyes colored like corpses and hair as black as the dead remains of a fire, then he should feel fear. And yet, all that comes is a warm curiosity, urging and eager to find this stranger who is so different from the rest, and so like himself. The Gods above wear deep mauve skin around their bones, and watch the men below through starry eyes, but Keith, with his human texture, sunny hair, and thunderstorm eyes, has always been as golden as the wheat he governs.

            There is another God with man’s features and an exile caging him from the rest, and Keith is determined to meet him.

            The ground sinks beneath his feet, easing down into itself like the soft sod along a murky river bank, though lacking all manner of reeds. There is no sound here, in this place without life or light, this place Keith finds may simply be _without_. Death as he has seen it is an overwhelming case of being without – without breath, without pulse, without response. He’d known death could come to a man, a beast, and a plant. Perhaps, in the Underworld, death has come to a place.

            Without light nor sound, there is no way to orient himself, to know where he is in relation to this world, and yet he knows, perhaps in the same way that he has always known things that man cannot, there is a path. It is thin and winding, and he raises his hand to trail it along the cliff face he feels scratching against his side, simultaneously smooth and rough. It feels damp, like the cold humidity of a cave, which is unsurprising. The men had said there was a river, uncrossable by the living. Perhaps the Underworld is merely a dank grotto, molding over ever so slowly. How grim it must be, to exist here.

            The path grows dry and firm, the cave widening until Keith’s hand must leave the chilled stone, and he senses something growing, simultaneously within himself and without. He is drawing nearer to something that is not this freezing, empty, _without_ -ness, something that is _something_ , rather than endless nothing. Light begins to escape him, seemingly radiating from that quiet warmth, until his skin glows like a grain field in the late afternoon, orange and yellow and golden, and alive. He is surprised by the notion, and intrigued as he looks about himself, catching his first glimpses of this place of death.

            It is gray, and blue, and black, like mulberries fallen from the vine, slowly rotting in the soil. The stone walls look sleek in places, worn down by erosion until they were made smooth as river stones, while other patches of sharp stone lie in wait between the sleek, sheltered from the brunt of whatever eroding force had come here. He almost thinks his radiance warms the stone, the illusion strengthened by the reflective way his light bounces off the shiny rock even as the cave continues to widen. There is a rounding bend up ahead, and at last, the first hints of sound find his ears.

            It is a deep noise, something that rumbles softly, like the ocean’s press against the shore, a push and pull of currents. Keith wonders if this is the fabled river, but the men had always said it marked the entrance of the Underworld, and he felt as if he were moving deeper into this realm, rather than outwards. But there is a draft as he begins to round the corner, a strong breeze that grows in strength, until it is a full, intermittent gust. A burst of air that lasts three steps, then still air and the rumbling of another wave for two more paces. Another burst, another lull. It cycles as a creeping sense of danger tingles along the back of Keith’s neck, and the waves’ crashing grows louder, the reverberations strong enough to be felt in the ground, and then in the core of his glowing body as he finishes the curve and comes face to face with the source.

            The sound is not water, but air, rumbling and rattling through the passages of a giant beast’s lungs. Or perhaps, three beasts, as Keith counts at least three massive heads in the cavern the path has suddenly opened up to. They must be laying stacked upon each other, though, as he can only make out one body.

            The beasts have long snouts which end in dark curling nostrils larger than Keith’s chest. The quivering jowls at either side of the things’ fearsome jaws are large and thick enough to be used as quilts, and the razor-like fangs he sees glinting and reflecting his own light back at him are longer than his forearms and thicker than his body. The beasts resemble the hunting dogs he’d seen at the men’s sides, only fifty times their size, with breaths so strong it is a struggle for him to remain still.

            “I see you’ve met Kerberos.”

            Keith flinches so intensely, as he spins toward the sudden voice, that he loses his footing, and is pushed over onto his hands by the billowing breath of the monstrous hound. The ground is grainy and cuts into his palms as he tries to center himself, fear lodged in his throat.

            “Who’s there?” he calls out to stall for enough time in which to orient himself. He can see a figure standing on the other side of a massive paw. They are taller than Keith, but still human-esque in size. When Keith stands, his light illuminates the other.

            “This is my realm,” the man says. Keith peers carefully through the gloom, taking in his features carefully. A cold pallor to the skin, short hair as dark as the world before Keith’s light had bloomed. There is a chill now that hadn’t been here before, and a stiffness to the air, almost as though it’s gone stagnant, all motion and life lost despite the dogs’ breathing.

            “The God of Death,” he concludes.

            “I prefer Shiro.”

            The name is a foreign sound to Keith’s ears, unlike the language or names of the humans he knew, and entirely unlike the names of the Gods above. His fear brought on by the initial surprise of the God’s sudden appearance has faded off, and gives way to a curiosity that burns like the light he radiates with greater intensity the closer he comes to this place.

            “Did they name you?” he asks, because the humans had named him. Keith, they said, was fashioned after their word for the woods, the only other thing as bountiful as his wake. Perhaps Shiro is another word for something, for the cold, or stillness, or darkness.

            “No,” Shiro says, and Keith’s postulations end. “I took it.”

            One of the beasts shifts in its sleep, and then, with a deafening rumble, begins to open its eyes. Keith swallows and takes a few steps backwards, wary of those great fangs as the creature sniffs the air and grumbles lowly, quilt-like lips gradually pulling taught in warning. Keith searches for an escape route, knowing he can’t be as swift as a beast that large, but Shiro pats the paw between them, and the monster turns its head to sniff at him instead. A ground shaking pounding comes as it wags its tail against the cave floor.

            “What is this,” Keith asks when he has found his voice.

            “Kerberos,” Shiro says again. The ‘kerberos’ barks loud enough to send rocks raining down from the ceiling.

            “And the others? Are they kerberoses too?”

            Shiro glances from the hound to the sweeping gesture Keith makes to the other two beasts. He smiles and pets the first creature’s muzzle.

            “No.”

            Keith frowns, because they look identical, and asks “Then what are they?”

            “They are him.” Shiro pats the beast. “This is Kerberos.”

            Kerberos shifts his massive paws, and the other two heads raise high enough for Keith to see they are all connected to the same torso. Kerberos is a singular beast.

            “Woah,” he manages. The God of Death laughs, the sound rasping and skeletal, like wind rattling the bare limbs of a tree. Keith inches towards him slowly, fascinated and terrified by the beast at once, and hoping for the chance to touch it.

            “You’re the God of Wheat.” Shiro does not ask, but states. Keith stills.

            “I am.”

            He is closer to Shiro now, and brighter than ever before. That sensation that the warmth is coming from both inside himself and outside is stronger here, feeling more like a tether or cord connecting him to another. He feels as though he is being pulled toward Shiro.

            “They named you for the woods.”

            Keith should ask how he knows that, but the first words to reach his lips are, “What does Shiro mean?” Shiro seems surprised, as though he hadn’t expected that question.

            “Nothing,” he says at length.

            Keith takes a step closer, lured by curiosity. “You stole a name that means Nothing?”

            “It doesn’t mean anything, because it isn’t the full thing.”

            Another step, then, brushing past Kerberos’s claws. “What is the full thing?”

            Shiro squints against the growing radiance, the light seemingly painful to his grey eyes. “Why do you want to know?”

            “Why shouldn’t I?”

            Another step.

            “Because I’m the reason you’re here.”

            Keith stills. “Am I dead?”

            “No.”

            “Then why am I here?”

            “Because I wanted to meet you.”

            Keith squints at the man. Kerberos shifts, taking his paw away to rest his nearest head on it, the motion shaking them again. Keith staggers but straightens himself and asks, “Are you going to court me?”

            Another smile tugs at Shiro’s lips. Up close, Keith can see it doesn’t meet his eyes.

            “I can see it all, from down here,” he says. Keith waits for him to elaborate, expecting the answer to his question. He does not receive it. “The birth of a new God doesn’t go unnoticed."

            Keith has heard this before, in other words, from other mouths. It is an indirect way of admitting to admiration, of saying ‘I’ve been watching you.’ A compliment intended to ease him into the concept of their courtship, though it has always had the opposite effect. Uncomfortable, the God braces his arms across his chest, building a physical wall. Shiro continues.  


            "I heard them say there’s never been so bright and golden a God as you. Do you know what that means?”

            “That I’m handsome?”

            “That you’re different. Like me.”

            Keith knows what he is referring to. Every other God he has ever met has been large, angular in the face, and of a cool shade that matches the dusts lurking out among the stars. Prior to Shiro, Keith was the only one with pale flesh, like an unripened fruit. Or, he realizes, it would be more accurate to say that _Shiro_ was the only unripe God before _Keith_ came to be. The variation has always earned Keith affection – there is not a God above besides his own father who hasn’t been drawn to him at one time or another – and it was that precise reason he left, to join the men. Keith has never wanted the attention, has rejected every gift and felt uncomfortable at every advance, but he has known and been told that his unique appearance is nothing short of a blessing. He is _special_ , and he is loved for it.

            Yet here is another, similar in color yet closer to the Gods in stature, with his wide chest and sharp jaw. He, like the others, makes Keith seem slight and feeble by comparison, and is more obviously a deity than the human-shaped God of Wheat will ever be. By all accounts, he ought to have been showered in just as much praise, and yet, Keith has never heard his name spoken. What would one have to do, in order to be banished so far from the adoring heavens? To be abandoned by all suitors?

            “Why are you here?” Keith asks. Shiro’s brow pinches a slight degree.

            “I told you, I brought you here. I wanted to meet you.”

            “No, I mean, why are you _here_?” He gestures to Kerberos and the cave around him. “Why don’t they talk about you? What did you do?”

            He can see the other’s face tighten. “I was born,” he says.

            Keith takes a step forward. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

            “Can you back up?” Shiro has an arm raised to shield his eyes, and takes half a step backward from Keith. “You’re too bright, it’s hard to look at you.”

            Keith tosses the request aside for the moment, pursuing the questions the God of Death is trying to avoid. He presses forward, further invading Shiro’s space. “What do you mean you were born? You had to do _something_. They wouldn’t kick you out for something that wasn’t your fault.”

            “Isn’t that what they did to you,” Shiro snaps. Keith trips, caught off balance by the accusation. He falls forward and toward the other, catching himself by grabbing the other’s raised arm. It is cold, freezing cold, but heating quickly beneath Keith’s glowing hand as his warmth, and then his _light_ flow into the other. Shiro flinches back, wrenching his arm free as they stare together at the limb. It is radiating its own light now, softer and paler compared to what Keith’s is – or was, as his own aura appears to have dimmed after spilling into Shiro’s arm – much like the moon’s borrowed light, stolen from the sun. Where Keith is golden, Shiro radiates silver.

            “I—” Keith begins, and pauses as his throat catches, because he’s _done something_ to this God, and even though their connection is broken, the effects remain. “I’m so sorry, I-I didn’t mean to… I don’t know what I did, but I—”

            Shiro raises his left hand – the unaltered one – to silence him.

            “No, it’s… warm.” Shiro stares at the silver light for a quiet moment more, before turning his gray eyes on Keith. They narrow in thought as he sweeps his gaze over the younger God’s face, searching, or perhaps just intrigued. “I’ve never been warm, before.”

            It’s an admission that leaves Keith staring, wide eyed and sad. Shiro clears his throat and looks off to his left, at the settled Kerberos who seems to be close to drifting off again. Keith thinks he’s beginning to understand.

            “They thought you were too cold?”

            Shiro doesn’t look at him when he answers. “Death is a dark thing, Keith. You noticed it, didn’t you? Among the humans? It spreads stench and grief, and can be contagious. Can contaminate anything around it.”

            “They thought you were bad.”

            Shiro turns back to meet Keith’s eyes, his look intense and significant. It is also deeply pained. “Some Gods can’t tell the difference between a God and his power. They loved you because you are life, and hated me, because I am death.”

            Keith looks back at the silver arm. If Shiro leached the light from other Gods, he could understand why they might have thought he was a danger, whether it had been on purpose or not. “Have you ever done that before?” he asks, and nods to the arm. Shiro raises it between them, rotating his wrist and examining the change.

            “No,” he says, voice soft and rasping as a final breath. “I think this is…” He looks at Keith, but doesn’t finish.

            Keith considers the tether he still feels, uniting their lights and pulling him in. He thinks about what the God of Death has said, about the others loving Keith for his power and hating Shiro for the same. They are like opposite faces of a blade in the sun, one side reflecting all light, the other encased in shadows. Keith meets Shiro’s eyes.

            “We’re connected,” he says. Shiro blinks, but doesn’t seem confused by the conclusion. He nods, once.

            “I felt it, too. The thread.”

            Keith understands without asking that Shiro means this tether.

            “They said it was red,” he continues. “The souls I gathered, from the East. They spoke of a red thread of fate.”

            “I like red,” Keith says. He thinks of apples, strawberries, and pomegranates, of the sky as the sun buries itself into the horizon and paints the world with a new, warm life just before the cold of night takes over. He repeats, “I like red.”

            There is a silence then, settled over the backdrop of Kerberos’s breathing. Keith focuses on the thread, wound tightly around their cores. A link that implies there will never be one without the other close behind. He wonders if the sun and the moon are connected this way, if all opposites are not destined to pull each other in a cycle. If all are fated to meet like this, and spill into some sort of equilibrium.

            “Silver,” Shiro says, soft and murmured like the water in a brook. Keith wonders what he means.

            “You like silver?”

            “I am silver.”

            Keith looks into the pale light, thinks Shiro is perhaps saddened it is dimmer than his. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why that happened.”

            “No,” Shiro shakes his head, “that’s not what I meant.” He lowers the arm and smiles, with his eyes this time as well as his pale lips. “They call it Shirogane.”

            “The souls?”

            “Yes. ‘White metal’, technically, but it means silver.”

            Keith looks at Shiro’s smile, looks at his glowing arm, and meets his eyes again, a small smile tucked into the corner of his own lips. “You’re welcome,” he says, because Shiro has been in darkness for so long, he’d put light in his name. Keith is happy he could put light in his form, as well.

            Shiro’s eyes soften, and the thread pulls stronger, leaving a vague aching in Keith’s chest that he doesn’t understand, though he senses it can only be quelled by following the lead. Slowly, he eases closer to the God of Death, who seems to be leaning closer to him in turn. In their proximity he can feel that chill which hovers about the other’s skin as life’s warmth would hover about any other. The cold meets Keith’s heat and settles into a comfortable warmth in the limited space between them.

            “There’s another word,” Shiro says. His eyelids fall heavy over his eyes, warming his gaze as it softens in the wake of Keith delicate upward glance. This close, Keith must tilt his head to meet those silver eyes.

            “What is it?” he breathes.

            “It means ‘yellow metal’, as in gold,” Shiro says. His words nearly brush against Keith’s face, and still the thread pulls tighter. “I think it suits you.”

            Keith begins to lift up, onto the balls of his feet. “What’s the word?”

            “Kogane.” There is a crackle to it, like the pop of a fire as it devours a log. Keith loves it, absorbs it, adopts it. If Shiro can take a name for himself, then so will Keith. Two sides of a blade, two parts of a cycle. Hot and cold, silver and gold, life and death.

            The thread loops itself around the back of Shiro’s neck and tugs, like arms, until Keith’s heat presses against his cold in a burst of shiver inducing warmth. His lips are soft, smooth as bone but pliant, and welcoming. Keith feels himself expanding, his heat expanding, and flowing towards Shiro’s presence, slow but heady, until the tingle of dizziness creeps into his mind. It is then that Shiro moves away.

            He is glowing, where the bridge of his nose met Keith’s. A lock of his hair has turned white, and Keith can only assume that fringe was responsible for the soft brush he’d felt against his own.

            He is beautiful, with this light. Keith begins to understand the others’ obsession with himself.

            But Shiro is frowning.

            “Your hair,” he says, raising his dim arm as if to touch it. He doesn’t. Lowers the arm to gesture at Keith’s body instead as his brow furrows. “Your light.”

            Keith looks down to see he has dimmed considerably. Glancing to the side, he finds his hair no longer resembles the grain for which he is known, but the darkness of this world, as black as the ravens that pick at carrion in the fields.

            “It’s in you,” he says slowly as he turns back to the glowing God.

            “I leached it from you,” Shiro whispers. Keith frowns.

            “We traded. This is yours.” He lifts a lock of his darkened hair, but it grants no solace to Shiro.

            “You can’t stay here,” he says. Keith looks between them, where he imagines that red thread to be, where he can feel its connection.

            “I want to,” he says.

            “I’ll kill you,” Shiro replies. It is not a threat, but rather a warning. An inevitability that they must acknowledge.

            With less of his light, Keith feels cold.

            “Can I come back?” he asks. Shiro’s face is grim.

            “I don’t know.”

            Keith considers the opposites again. Nothing can ever be both ends. That which is hot is never cold, night is never day, and the dead are no longer alive. The silver side of the blade cannot be its golden opposite as well. There must be distance.

            But as the sun chases the moon, Keith will always be drawn back here.

            “You have to leave,” Shiro says, and takes a step back. Keith feels their tether tug. He nods. “I’ll be watching,” Shiro promises.

            Keith smiles. He cannot feel it reach his eyes. “Yeah, okay.”

            “Kerberos can lead you out.”

            The massive beast is woken, stroked, and given instructions. With every step Keith takes beside the animal, careful not to touch incase his light will seep into the dog as well, he feels the thread between them stretching further. He wonders if it will break, if pulled too far, but senses enough slack in the cord to carry on. It is at the mouth of the cave, after the beast carries him across the river and leaves him at the cave’s edge, that Keith looks back.

            Though separated by Kerberos’s returning form, by a river of death and a mile of lifeless stone, they are still connected. Here, just this side of the land of the living, Keith feels the world blooming at his feet again. He thinks of the plants tangling about his ankles, vibrant and living, and knows that they will die, in their own time. Will Shiro come to collect them, as well, when that time comes? Will he know they were born in Keith’s wake?

            Keith closes his eyes and presses focus into the energy flowing through him. Carefully he begins to sow seeds into the land, pouring life into them until they burst and bloom, stalks rising and opening up into delicate white lilies. He lines the cave’s mouth with them, thick, natural bouquets, and hopes that, when the time comes, they will bring a smile to Shiro’s eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> The final section was inspired by [this post](http://constructionpaperandtears.tumblr.com/post/100351907244/).
> 
> Also fun fact Pluto was considered a god of wealth because minerals, which were valuable, were found underground. Really fits with the whole precious metals last name thing the boys have going on. 
> 
> Come yell at me about the boys on my [tumblr](http://maple-moose-muffin.tumblr.com/)!


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